La Peste d’Albert Camus et Ensaio sobre a cegueira de José Saramago :épidémie, allégorie et apprentissage

Resumo

 Our analysis will focus on the representation of the plague in La Peste (1947), by Camus and the configuration of blindness in Saramago, in Ensaio sobre a cegueira (1995), based on the feeling of the absurd, Camus’ philosophical proposal in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942). The epidemic is the incarnation of the absurd, as man, in search of clarity and unity, is confronted with an irrational world, deprived of God. Recovering the rehabilitation of Kafka’s allegory, Camus and Saramago build plurisignificant allegories: in Camus, in the figurative meaning, the plague constitutes the resistance struggle against Nazism in the Second World War.
In Saramago, blindness refers to the hyper-individualistic excesses of postindustrial society at the end of the 20th century. On a metaphysical level, the novels transcend historical interpretation by attributing symbolic dimensions to epidemics such as moral, ethical, political decadence and the metaphor of ignorance, alienation and all evils. In line with catastrophe pedagogy, according
to Sloterdijk (2002), the parables of Camus and Saramago teach how to see and correct man’s mistakes through an alternative community, based on solidarity and empathy, proposing to rethink a new ethics in moments of greater degradation of humanism, providing preventive readings in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.